When making a choice to interact with a person speed is one variable.
If you have an agenda and time demands it may feel to others like you are trying to push or rush them through ‘your’ list of things that you need to get done rather than allowing them to be an active part of what is happening ‘together’. But again, that depends on the role of each person.
When we are in the shopping mall and are pushing a young child around in a pram, the parent is in control of the speed and direction of how you are interacting with the child. Yet. You aren’t. The child has already set time limits on how long you will be able to spend out shopping before their individual needs become a priority again – they will want to eat so you will have to stop what you are doing and take care of them, they will need changing nappy wise so again you will have to stop what you are doing and take care of them, they will get upset and want to get out of the pram so again YOU will have to STOP what you are doing and take care of THEM. But the query is – needing to shop isn’t one of those things that we as adults have the ability to control our time with – the layout of a shopping mall requires us to walk up and down the aisles to find exactly what we need and walk from one side of the mall to the other so that you can go from one shop to the next. The time that you actively spend picking things up off of the shelves isn’t a lot, its the actual movement between everything that takes the time.
So when I talk about appropriate speed of interactions where are the elements of speed within shopping if you are pushing a pram. Surely there is an even speed in how you push the pram because you need to walk slowly so that you can find what you need and its unsafe to push too fast. So where is the speed?
How quickly did you need to rush through your morning routines to get to the shops in enough time to get everything that you needed before then turning around to get home to do the rest of the days chores? Or did you just miss things out because you know that you don’t have time for them that other things are more important?
Supermarket design – what are you own personal visual analysis skills like? These days we are required to find unique brands for health care purchases amidst the large quantities of products on shelves or to work out comparisons amongst products. Does the packaging help? No.
Video Resources:
Set Tour – Guy’s Grocery Games
Supermarket Psychology: Supermarket Layout
Supermarket Psychology: Entrances, layout and shelving
Research Article Resources:
Aishwarya Madan Mirajkar, Aishwarya Prafulla Sankpal, Priyanka Shashikant Koli, Rupali Anandrao Patil, Ajit Ratnakar Pradnyavant (2016) Data Mining Based Store Layout Architecture for Supermarket. International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET), Volume 3, Issue 2.
Murphy M, Koohsari MJ, Badland H, Giles-Corti B. Supermarket access, transport mode and BMI: the potential for urban design and planning policy across socio-economic areas. Public Health Nutr. 2017 Dec;20(18):3304-3315. doi: 10.1017/S1368980017002336. Epub 2017 Sep 7. PMID: 28879832.
Thorndike AN. Healthy choice architecture in the supermarket: Does it work? Soc Sci Med. 2020 Dec;266:113459. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113459. Epub 2020 Oct 24. PMID: 33127172.
Nikolaus CJ, Muzaffar H, Nickols-Richardson SM. Grocery Store (or Supermarket) Tours as an Effective Nutrition Education Medium: A Systematic Review. J Nutr Educ Behav. 2016 Sep;48(8):544-554.e1. doi: 10.1016/j.jneb.2016.05.016. Epub 2016 Jul 14. PMID: 27423940.
Ying F, Wallis AOG, Beguerisse-Díaz M, Porter MA, Howison SD. Customer mobility and congestion in supermarkets. Phys Rev E. 2019 Dec;100(6-1):062304. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.100.062304. PMID: 31962461.